Personal Kanban: the one rule everyone skips
by Andreas Tissen · · updated
Personal kanban is two rules: visualise the work, and limit work in progress. Almost everybody adopts the first, because a board is pleasant to look at and easy to set up. Almost nobody adopts the second, because keeping it means telling yourself no.
A board without a limit is a to-do list with columns: it looks organised and changes nothing. That is why so many people report that kanban "did not really do anything for them". They put up the board and never set the limit.
The limit is the method
Give your Doing column a limit on work items in progress (a WIP limit), and do not exceed it. For one person that limit is two, occasionally three, never five.
Writing a number into a column is not what changes anything. The change comes the first time you want to start something new and Doing is full, because now you must either finish something or explicitly park something, and both of those are decisions you would otherwise have dodged by starting the new thing anyway and quietly carrying five half-finished ones.
Write the limit into the column name, so that you read it every time you look at the board instead of having to remember it.
To do, Doing, Done, and Parked
The base board is three columns: To do, Doing (max 2), Done.
The fourth column worth having is Parked, because without somewhere to put the thing you are stopping, you will break the limit the moment you are under pressure. With Parked, stopping is a legitimate move instead of a failure.
A card that sits in Parked through two reviews belongs in Someday, or it belongs deleted.
Why an outline instead of a board app
Because a card is a bullet. A bullet carries its own children: the notes, the next actions, the waiting-fors that belong to that piece of work. In most board tools a card is a title plus a description, so the real detail ends up somewhere else, and now the work lives in two halves.
And because the board is a LAYOUT rather than a document type, the same branch is a plain list again whenever you want to think about it as a list, which means the week you do not need a board, you do not have a board to maintain.
What to watch after two weeks
Count the cards that crossed into Done. That number is your throughput, and it is usually a surprise. You learn much less from counting the cards that sit on the board. If Doing ran over its limit routinely and throughput did not rise, you now have the finding kanban was built around: the work in progress was slowing you down, not speeding you up.
Take the limit
Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", and put this week's real work in it. Set the WIP limit on Doing to two and keep it there for a fortnight. The limit is the method; everything else is decoration.